Kerrie Joyce 
Street cleaning or street sweeping is a common practice in urban areas for plenty of reasons. It can remove hazards or pollutants, improve air quality, and even improve public health. Despite all of its benefits, for car owners it can often feel like a nuisance. Since failing to move your car can carry a hefty fine, some city-dwellers have gotten creative with ways to circumvent parking penalties with minimal interruption to their busy schedules. Read on for local expertise on how to navigate Hoboken’s street cleaning schedule and avoid parking tickets.
What Hoboken Drivers Need To Know
Like most cities, the streets of Hoboken can get cluttered with dirt, litter, and debris that can pose a danger to humans, our pets, and our cars. Some dangerous debris can include sharp objects like glass and nails, especially near areas with ongoing construction projects. Keeping streets clean of debris is also important to lessen the risks posed by adverse weather events like the flooding that Hoboken is prone to. The practice is also a way of keeping track of what cars might be potentially abandoned vehicles, after collecting multiple tickets without moving.
The City of Hoboken’s website lists the weekday and time each street is scheduled to be cleaned. For example, if you are parked on the West side of Adams Street on a Monday, between cross-streets Newark and Sixteenth Street, you will need to move your car to an alternate parking spot between 11AM to 12PM. Since parking is increasingly hard to come by, you might even end up circling the block for the full hour. There are also signs posted on each side of the street listing the times for cleaning on every block.
The City of Hoboken has made some recent changes to parking rules, putting an end to free Sunday parking. Keeping other parking regulations in mind, the options for what you can do with your car are quite limited and often expensive. What is also expensive, however, is the cost of the ticket for failing to move your car for cleaning, which carries a $50 penalty. The cost is even higher if your car gets towed. According to SpotAngels, a parking app, street cleaning tickets are the most commonly issued type of Hoboken parking ticket.
Street cleaning is suspended on certain holidays, as per the City’s calendar, and during some weather emergencies.
Local Parking Heroes
As a solution to city parking trouble, Sydney Charlet created a viral side hustle “car-sitting” in NYC’s Upper West Side, moving residents’ cars or circling blocks in them while their street is being cleaned. In New York, fines are higher than those of Hoboken, falling at around $65. Charlet told the New York Post that she can cover half of her monthly Manhattan rent with her earnings from the business.
In Hoboken, the owner of local ice-cream business Moo Jersey crafted a more user-friendly guide to navigating street cleaning, organized in order of weekday and time rather than street name. The Moo Jersey Street Cleaning Guide is posted both on the Moo Jersey website and on a Hoboken local Reddit thread.
The city runs a Corner Car Program to reduce the number of cars that overwhelm the streets, outnumbering available parking spots. According to the program webpage, most vehicle-owning residents in Hoboken primarily rely on public transit options for their commute and use their cars sparingly for getting groceries, summer beach trips, or family visits, and not much else. To open up more parking in the city, the Corner Car program allows residents to opt out of paying high fees for street parking, parking garages, or potential tickets, and instead only pay for time spent using the shared car. The pool cars are also already parked in reserved spots and are operated by Zipcar. According to the city, for each shared car provided by the program, 17 households have given up their cars, creating more space availability.
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